As Catherine Morgan, Hewlett-Packard's Hard Copy unit manager, noted in a press briefing today at Ontario's Science Centre, HP has announced the largest collection of hard copy products in the company's history. But, you may wonder, in the age of on-line information and digital documents, aren't printers, well, passé? On the contrary, the company notes that 1996 was the first year that the number of pages produced by printers exceeded those from copiers. Indeed, many of the products aim to capitalize on the growing importance of the Internet to businesses around the globe. After all, Xplor International, a Torrance, CA-based research firm estimates that, by 2004, 70 percent of the world's info will be digitized. HP's latest internet-based printing initiatives seek to provide long-distance printing solutions to turn that mountain of digital data into print -- on demand, anywhere, anytime.
As Pierre Montmartin, senior VP of HP's channel marketing group optimistically enthused, we should imagine "receiving the most current edition of a newspaper, beamed via satellite and printed while aboard a speeding train." On a more practical level for the needs of most small businesses, he also noted case studies in which companies were able to reduce accounts receivable turnarounds from 45 days when a black-and-white statement was sent, to only 28 days when a color printer is used to highlight amounts and due dates in red.
Part of the announcement was centered on the technology HP calls JetSend, which allows the transmission of data without use of a PC or drivers. The company says it collaborated with over 30 partners, including Canon, Konica, Lexmark and Xerox, on JetSend. Hence, HP says it is now possible to send via IR or serial links, image data from cameras, scanners, projectors, video devices, etc., to printers, multifunction peripherals, PCs, laptops and other IR-capable devices. The company demonstrated this capability with its US$695 CapShare scanner. In fact, Dr. Ross R. Allen, the head of the team that developed the product, as well as pioneering the thermal inkjet technology HP uses throughout its line of inkjet products, was on hand to explain how it works -- in as much detail as even the sturdiest computer journalist could want. He passed the handheld device rapidly (and quite imprecisely) in overlapping swipes across a printed page and then beamed a perfectly stitched-together page to an IR-equipped portable as a digital document. Allen says the document is transmitted in the Acrobat PDF (portable document format) format developed and popularized by Adobe Systems Inc. The CapShare scanner can be dragged over a page of text any number of times in virtually any direction (even deliberately squiggling down the page!) and the embedded processor automatically stitches the information together into a seamless page. Allen claims the processor that does this has the processing power of five Pentium CPUs. It's impressive and works remarkably well, although we can't help but wonder whether the market will accept a new handheld scanner -- especially at that price -- when virtually every "how to buy a scanner" article written over the last ten years specifically advises against handheld scanners. But, there's no denying: this is the best handheld scanner ever developed. Details at www.capshare.hp.com.
Also touted was the previously announced capability HP calls "HP JetDirect," which enables printer management and printing over the Internet. A new feature called HP WebJet Admin provides, as the name implies, web-based printer management, simplifying remote configuration -- handy in office intranets, even if it's just the printer down the hall.
And then there's the mountain of new products, to which an HP presentation of the Imax film Everest (what a movie!) proved a suitable metaphor. No less than 20 new products were announced, running the gamut from monochrome and color lasers, inkjet printers, network copiers, all-in-one (MFP) units and scanners. (See www.hp.com for full details.)
We were particularly impressed by the $4995 Color LaserJet 4500, a unit that finally provides the kind of quality that has, until now, apparently proven so difficult for color laser manufacturers to deliver. It's worth noting that color lasers have dramatically lower per-page costs than color inkjets -- as low, says HP, as 5 cents per page for the five percent coverage typical of a business document or invoice, or about 12 cents per page for 20% coverage.
We were a bit disappointed to note that, on close inspection, banding is still visible in HP's so-called "next generation" inkjet printers, the HP 2000C and 2500C models. At approximately, arm's length, however, an image on glossy paper is virtually photographic in quality. Dr. Allen noted that the size of the ink drops dispensed by HP's newest inkjet models is 8 picolitres. And how much is that? Well, a picolitre is 1/1,000,000,000,000 litre. Put another way, 1 picolitre is to a litre as a penny is to $10 billion dollars -- or if you prefer to think of money as we do, a stack of dollar bills 13Km (8 miles) high. For comparison, the earliest HP inkjet (the 1985 ThinkJet) had one tenth the drop frequency, 25 times fewer print-head orifices and 1/100th of the operational life. It delivered a whopping 96 dpi -- a term that HP cautions is no longer especially useful in describing digital image quality.
The "dpi" specification can be misleading, explains Dr. Allen, because:
Imagine, for example, two printed images, both with the "same" 300-dpi resolution. One uses a four-colour binary (pixels/inch) printing method, while the other uses 6-colours and a halftone system to build "superpixels" out of smaller binary spots. The latter image will show smoother color transitions and lower image grain, with tens to thousands of colors per pixel. Indeed, pixels/inch and printable colours/pixel are related to image quality, he says, but the relationship to image quality is still very complex, and there is no direct relationship between dpi and image quality in halftone printing.
As we noted in our review of the HP DeskJet 722C, HP has some very cool technology in its latest printers, such as PhotoREt II. This resolution enhancement process uses what appears to be an unsharp masking technique to increase the contrast at the edges of images, producing a result from the DeskJet 722C we tested that was, to our eyes, considerably better defined, but also "grainier" than the photographic output of the Epson Stylus Color 740 we compared it to. (Compare the output for yourself. Both printers used premium glossy stock and the highest quality settings.)
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